An obscure Christian dating website called ToddAndClare.com is waging a legal war on Julian Assange based on Swedish rape and sexual assault charges against him. WikiLeaks has denounced the campaign as a "smear," as expected, but even a a modicum of thread-pulling at the dating agency's actions suggests something far shadier than what is being presented.

Shortly after the Times recently published a lengthy—and largely anonymously-sourced—report making the case that Russia often benefits from WikiLeaks' actions (which was criticized as "McCarthyist" by Glenn Greenwald and others, a claim supported by lines in the Times story like "United States officials say they believe with a high degree of confidence that the Democratic Party material was hacked by the Russian government, and suspect that the codes may have been stolen by the Russians as well") the Daily Dot unearthed evidence in sealed court records that WikiLeaks elected not to release a €2 billion money trail from the Syrian regime to a Russian government-owned bank in its "Syria Files" cache. In response to questions from the Daily Dot, WikiLeaks threatened retaliation against the reporters and made the same "neo-McCarthyist" argument.

It's no secret, though, that regardless of Assange's publicly stated devotion to total transparency of the documents he's released—which is a recent stance, as he previously reached out to the State Department to solicit its help in redacting cables, and has since lead to the deterioration of his relationships with Times and Guardian editors—has roots in a political maneuver perfected in Russia: "information warfare," or what the Russians call kompromat, or the well-timed release of compromising material.

Perhaps not coincidentally, the material WikiLeaks has released over the years has grown more and more compromising, revealing credit card and social security numbers of Democratic Party donors, private information about nearly all female voters in Turkey (along with dozens of malware links), and the identities of hundreds of Afghan citizens who acted as American informants.

The FBI, part of the intelligence community anonymously speculating to the press that the Russian government is behind the recent hacks of the DNC, Colin Powell, the World Anti-Doping Agency, and others, is attempting to build a legal case with which to indict individual Russian hackers.

Ka-ching... here's what is cost to be an amba$$ador for Hillary's $tate Dept. #DNCLeak #DNCLeaks pic.twitter.com/b9HoT4iZi1

— Steve Milloy (@JunkScience) September 14, 2016

DNC emails newly released by WikiLeaks—sourced to Guccifer 2.0, who the intelligence community links to Russia in anonymously statements—contain lists of donors to the DNC, many of whom later received ambassadorships or were appointed to other positions of power, adding credibility to the claim that Clinton engaged in pay-to-play practices as Secretary of State.